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Last month, during a meeting of Democrats in rural southwestern Iowa, a man raised his hand. “What are three noncontroversial issues that Democrats should be talking about right now?” he asked the evening’s speaker, Rob Sand, Iowa’s state auditor and a minor state celebrity.
I watched from the side of the room as Sand answered quickly. The first two issues Democrats should talk about are new state laws dealing with democracy and education, he told the man. And then they should talk about their support for abortion rights. “People in the Iowa Republican Party and their activist base” want to “criminalize abortion,” Sand said.
I registered this response with a surprised blink. Noncontroversial? Democrats in competitive states, and especially committed centrists like Sand, aren’t usually so eager to foreground abortion on the campaign trail. This seemed new.
Ascribing a narrative to some elections is easy. The past two midterm cycles are a case in point. The Democrats’ 2018 blue wave, for example, will go down as a woman-led backlash to a grab-’em-by-the-groin president. In 2022, Democrats performed better than expected, according to many analysts, because abortion rights were on the ballot. Now, a year after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Democrats want to do it again.
They’re betting that they can re-create and even supercharge their successes last year by centering abortion rights in their platform once again in the lead-up to 2024. They want all of their elected officials—even state auditors—talking about the issue. “If we can do all that, we’re gonna be telling the same story in December 2024 that we told in 2022,” Yasmin Radjy, the executive director of the progressive political group Swing Left, told me.
But this time, Republicans might be better prepared for the fight.
After the leaked draft opinion before the Dobbs decision last May, many in Washington assumed that abortion would fade from voters’ minds by the time November rolled around. “As we get further away from the shock of that event, of Roe being overturned, you don’t think that … people will sort of lose interest?” CNN’s Don Lemon asked the Democratic political strategist Tom Bonier in September 2022. People did not. Two months later, Democrats celebrated better-than-expected results—avoiding not only the kind of “shellacking” that Barack Obama’s party had suffered in 2010, but the widely predicted red wave. The Democrats narrowly lost the House but retained control of the Senate, flipping Pennsylvania in the process. Abortion-rights campaigners won ballot measures in six states.
“The lesson has been well learned,” Bonier told me last week. “This is an issue that is incredibly effective, both for mobilizing voters but also for winning over swing voters.”
The latest polling suggests that the issue is very much alive. A record-high number of registered U.S. voters say that abortion is the most important factor in their decision about whom to vote for, and most of those voters support abortion rights, according to Gallup. Rather than growing less salient over time, abortion may even have gained potency: Roughly a quarter of Americans say that recent state efforts to block abortion access have made them more supportive of abortion rights, not less, according to a USA Today poll last week. Not only that, but recent data suggest that demand for abortion has not been much deterred, despite post-Dobbs efforts to restrict it.
Americans have watched as Republicans in 20 states restricted or banned abortion outright, and activists took aim at interstate travel for abortions and the pill mifepristone. Stories about pregnant women at risk of bleeding out or becoming septic after being denied abortions have lit up the internet for months. All of this attention and sentiment seem unlikely to dissipate by November 2024.
“Republicans ran races on this issue for decades,” the Democratic strategist Lis Smith told me. “You’re gonna see Democrats run on this issue for decades to come as well.”
Already, Democratic activists plan to engage swing voters by forcing the issue in as many states as possible. So far, legislators in New York and Maryland have introduced abortion-related ballot measures for 2024. Similar efforts are under way in other states, including Florida, Arizona, Missouri, South Dakota, and Iowa.
Smith and her fellow party operatives are confident that they’ve landed on a message that works—especially in purple states where candidates need to win over at least a few moderates and independents. The most successful Democrats last year anchored their abortion messages around the concept of personal liberty, Swing Left’s Radjy told me, because it was “the single issue that is equally popular among far left, far right, center left, and center right.” Radjy shared with me a research report that concluded: “With limited attention and resources, [candidates should] lead with the freedom to decide. Freedom is resonating with the base and conflicted supporters, as well as Soft Biden and Soft Trump women.”
Smith echoed this reframing. “Republican politicians want to insert themselves into women’s personal medical decisions,” she said, by way of exemplifying the message. “They want to take away this critical freedom from you.” In her view, that gives Democratic candidates a decisive advantage: They don’t even have to say the word abortion; they only have to use the language of freedom for people to be receptive.
Joe Biden has never been the most comfortable or natural messenger on abortion. But even he is giving the so-called freedom framework a try. Freedom is the first word in the president’s reelection-announcement ad. Republicans, he says in a voice-over, are “dictating what health-care decisions women can make”; they are “banning books, and telling people who they can love.”
It’s helpful, Democratic strategists told me, that the Republicans jockeying for the presidential nomination have been murky at best on the issue. Former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley held a press conference in April to explain that she sees a federal role in restricting abortion, but wouldn’t say what. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina was foggy on his own commitments in interviews before appearing to support a 15-week national ban. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who recently signed a six-week limit on abortion, talks about that ban selectively. The leader of the primary pack, Donald Trump, has said that abortion laws should be left to the states, but told a reporter recently that he, too, is “looking at” a 15-week restriction.
Trump clearly wants to appease the primary base while keeping some room to maneuver in the general election. But if he’s the nominee, Democrats say, he’ll have to answer for the end of Roe, as well as the anti-abortion positions advocated by other Republicans. “When I worked for Obama in 2012, as rapid-response director, we tied Mitt Romney to the most extreme positions in his party,” Smith told me. If Trump is the abortion-banning GOP’s nominee, they will “hang that around his neck like a millstone.”
I found it difficult to locate Republican strategists willing to talk with me about abortion, and even fewer who see it as a winning issue for their party. One exception was the Republican pollster and former Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, who says that Republicans can be successful in campaigning on abortion—if they talk about it the right way. At a press conference celebrating the anniversary of the Dobbs decision, hosted by the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony List, Conway seemed to take a swipe at the former president—and the rest of the wishy-washy primary field. “If you’re running to be president of the United States, it should be easy to have a 15-minimum-week standard,” she said.
To win on abortion is to frame your opponent as more extreme, and Democrats have made that easy, says Conway, who also acts as an adviser to the Republican National Committee. Broad federal legislation put forward by Democratic lawmakers last year, in response to the Dobbs leak, would prevent states from banning abortion “after fetal viability” for reasons of the mother’s life or health. Republicans claim that this means that Democrats support termination at all stages of pregnancy. Voters may not like outright bans on abortion, but they also generally don’t support abortion without limits. Conway advises Republican candidates to explain to voters whether they support exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother, and get that out of the way—and then demand that their Democratic opponents define the time limits they favor. “I’d ask each and every one of them, ‘What are your exceptions? I’ve shown you mine,’” Conway told me.
Conway’s bullishness is belied by what some of her political allies are up to. While Democrats are pushing for ballot measures that will enshrine abortion rights into law, Republicans are trying to make it harder to pass state constitutional amendments. For example, after it became clear that a ballot measure could result in new abortion protections being added to the Ohio Constitution, state Republicans proposed their own ballot measure asking voters in a special election later this summer to raise the threshold for passing constitutional amendments.
This scheme does not demonstrate faith that a majority of voters are with them. But it does set up Ohio as the first practical test of abortion’s salience as a political issue in 2024. If Democrats can get their voters to show up this August in the name of abortion rights, maybe they can do it next year too.
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Elaine Godfrey
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